March 3 (Bloomberg) -- Western leaders from President
Barack Obama to Chancellor Angela Merkel are telling Russia not
to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty. Vladimir Putin’s response as
he prepares for military conflict: What about ours?

Putin has been warning the U.S. and other North Atlantic
Treaty Organization states for at least six years not to impede
Russian interests in Ukraine, particularly in Crimea, where the
Black Sea Fleet has been based since its founding by Catherine
the Great in 1783 after the Ottoman Empire ceded the peninsula.

Putin told a closed NATO summit in Romania in 2008 that the
military alliance was threatening Ukraine’s very existence by
courting it as a member, according to a secret cable published
by Wikileaks. Putin said Ukraine’s borders were “sewn
together” after World War II and its claims to Crimea, which
belonged to Russia until Nikita Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in
1954, are legally dubious, Kurt Volker, the U.S. ambassador to
NATO at the time, said in the cable.

Four months later, Putin demonstrated his willingness to
back up words with actions by sending Russian troops to war
against Georgia, another former Soviet state, over two Russian-speaking regions seeking independence.

Now, in Putin’s eyes, it’s the U.S. and the European Union
who are pushing Ukraine to the brink of armed conflict by
supporting the overthrow of Kremlin-backed President Viktor
Yanukovych. Elected four years ago, Yanukovych was deposed by
lawmakers on Feb. 22 after clashes with protesters in Kiev left
at least 82 people dead, the worst violence the country has
witnessed since World War II. Russia’s Foreign Ministry called
it a “coup” by “fascists” carried out at Russia’s expense.

Russian Language

What pushed Putin to ask Russia’s parliament for approval
to use troops in Ukraine was a decision, unnoticed by much of
the western media, made by Ukraine’s parliament the next day,
according to Sergei Markov, a Kremlin adviser who’s now the
director of the Institute for Political Studies in the Russian
capital. That’s when lawmakers voted to overturn legislation
making Russian an official language.

Even though acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said he’d
veto the change, the move created “major fears” in the mainly
Russian-speaking eastern part of the country, Markov said by
phone. In Ukraine, “the West is seeking to create an anti-Russia,” Markov said. “Putin doesn’t want to wait and see what
happens, so he may engage in a small war now to protect Russia’s
interests and avoid a big war in the future.”

‘Russian Chauvinism’

In the wake of the Orange Revolution, which prevented
Yanukovych from coming to power after rigged elections in 2004,
pro-Russian forces, “with funding and direction from Moscow,”
embarked upon a multiyear effort to stoke communal tensions in
Crimea and “prevent Ukraine’s movement west into institutions
like NATO and the EU,” according to another leaked cable from
the U.S. State Department.

“They have done so by cynically fanning ethnic Russian
chauvinism towards Crimean Tatars and ethnic Ukrainians, through
manipulation of issues like the status of the Russian language,
NATO, and an alleged Tatar threat to ‘Slavs,’” Sheila Gwaltney,
then the No. 2 official at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, said in the
2006 cable.

Gwaltney is now the top U.S. official in Moscow, after the
departure of Ambassador Michael McFaul last month. The U.S.
Embassy’s press service in Moscow had no immediate comment when
contacted by phone today.

Airports Seized

Ukraine mobilized its army reserves yesterday and called
for foreign observers in Crimea after Russian-speaking forces
seized control of government buildings and airports. Russians
comprise 59 percent of Crimea’s population of about 2 million,
with 24 percent Ukrainian and 12 percent Tatar, 2001 census data
show. Russians make up 17 percent of Ukraine’s total population
of 45 million.

Russian-speaking gunmen arrived outside Ukraine’s infantry
base in Privolnoye in Crimea yesterday, continuing a pattern of
intimidation around key facilities that started last week.
Before Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia had about 15,000 sailors and
soldiers stationed permanently at bases that support the Black
Sea Fleet in and around Sevastopol, the largest city in Crimea.

Ukraine’s defense minister said Russia sent 6,000 more
soldiers into Crimea within a 24-hour period over the weekend
and that number is increasing “every hour” according to Yuriy
Sergeyev, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations. The new
government in Kiev said efforts to speak with Russia’s Foreign
Ministry were ignored.

Olympic Gold

Russian fighter jets violated Ukrainian airspace and more
ships arrived, border guards and the Defense Ministry said
today. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is traveling to Kiev
after discussing sanctions against Russia with EU officials.

While Putin said over the weekend that Russia may take
action if it sees unrest in other Russian-speaking regions in
eastern Ukraine, the president hasn’t made that decision yet,
his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said by phone.

The uprising coincided with the end of one of Putin’s
greatest triumphs -- the Sochi Winter Olympics, where Russian
athletes regained the glory of their Soviet predecessors by
topping the medals table.

That success helped lift the former KGB colonel’s public
approval rating to 67.7 percent on Feb. 23, a 7 percentage point
increase from the previous month and the highest since May 2012,
when he was inaugurated for a third time, according to a poll by
the state-run All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion,
known as VTsIOM. With the term extended to six years from four,
Putin, first elected in 2000, may stay in power until 2024 if he
runs and wins again in 2018.

Arrests, Propaganda

Putin, 61, who once described the breakup of the Soviet
Union as the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th
century, was named “Person of the Year” in December by the
Times of London for helping avert U.S. strikes against Syria.
That effort “propelled the president back into the front ranks
of effective world statesmen,” the Times said.

Putin is taking no chances with his legacy at home, where
last week seven people were sentenced to as long as four years
in prison for violence during a 2012 rally against him. His most
vocal opponent, Alexey Navalny, was confined to his home and
barred from using the Internet or speaking to the public for two
months. Navalny was one of 600 protesters detained at two anti-Putin rallies on Feb. 24.

Russian state television stations, the most popular in the
country, are in propaganda overdrive as the Kremlin seeks to
rally the population behind Putin’s toughening stance on
Ukraine, according to Katri Pynnoniemi, an analyst at the
Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki.

‘Hero-City’

“Sevastopol is a hero-city in Russia’s national
consciousness and official Russian media is now exploiting
that,” Pynnoniemi said by e-mail. “This is a legacy from
Russia’s military victory over the Nazis and it’s being
exploited in the Russian official parlance to de-legitimize
Ukraine’s newly elected government.”

Sevastopol, a symbol of Russian heroism not unlike the
Alamo for Americans, has been under siege by western forces
before -- first by the British and the French during the Crimean
War in the 1850s and then by Nazi forces in 1941-1942.

The road to revolution in Ukraine, which has endured three
recessions since 2008, started in Kiev in November, when
Yanukovych pulled out of a free-trade deal with the EU, opting
instead for $15 billion of Russian aid and cheaper gas. The
ousted leader, who is now in Russia, also pursued closer ties
with Putin’s customs union with Kazakhstan and Belarus.

G-8 Preparations

Ukraine depends on Russia for 60 percent of its gas and is
the main transit route for OAO Gazprom’s shipments to Europe,
where the state-run company has a quarter of the market. Russia
halted gas flows to Ukraine in 2006 and 2009 -- before
Yanukovych’s presidency -- amid disputes over prices and
volumes, leading to shortages throughout Europe.

The U.S., the U.K. and Canada responded to Russia’s move on
Crimea by suspending preparations due to take place in Russia
this week for a meeting of the Group of Eight industrial nations
in June in Sochi, the Black Sea resort that hosted the Winter
Olympics. The U.S. called on Russia to withdraw its forces to
bases in Crimea, refrain from interfering elsewhere in Ukraine
and conduct “direct engagement” with the new government. The
U.K. said it won’t send government ministers to watch the
Paralympics.

None of the rhetoric or action announced to date is likely
to impress Putin, Amanda Paul, an analyst at the European Policy
Center in Brussels, said in an interview.

“President Putin doesn’t really care what the rest of the
world thinks about his foreign policy,” Paul said by phone.
“Ukraine is a neighbor country that Russia views as indivisible
from itself. Russia is prepared to go to any length to stop
Ukraine’s deeper integration with Europe.”